Exit Religion Enter God Beth Houston by Beth Houston 9780998819624, 099881962X, 970998819624 instant download after payment.

EXIT RELIGION, ENTER GOD might be the perfect book for you if you are:
•Spiritual but not religious
•Questioning your religious beliefs
•Philosophically inclined
•A Deist
This bundle contains these previously published books:
1. Born-Again Deist: My Journey Beyond Religion to the Plain Truth of God
2. Natural God: Deism in the Age of Intelligent Design: A Deconstruction of Atheism and Religious Fundamentalism
3. A new author’s preface
BORN-AGAIN DEIST recounts the author’s four-decade journey "from being spiritually inclined to born-again Christian to progressive Christian to disillusioned agnostic to delighted Deist." While acknowledging that her Christian born-again experience was spiritually real, she explains how her religious experience was socially constructed and fraught with contradictions.
Broadly deconstructing "text worship," including biblical literalism, Houston argues that religious myths, superstitions, and claims of "special revelation" must be transcended by a belief that does not contradict our innate, God-given faculties of reason, conscience, intuition, experience, volition, emotion, and aesthetic sensibility, referred to collectively as common sense. She reminds us that belief is belief, not absolute truth. Deism, literally God-ism, is a humanist, minimalist religion "of God and only God." To underscore her case for democratic religion, she cites American revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and on the other hand exposes with numerous examples the dark side of deified religion and the exploitation of naïve faith.
In NATURAL GOD, Houston positions Deism as the Golden Mean between atheist-materialist Darwinism and religious fundamentalism. She argues that exquisitely designed Creation necessitates a transcending Intelligent Designer that is immanently engaged in the perpetual process of creating novelty sustained within the secure margins of natural laws.
Houston’s explication, sprinkled with satire, demystifies Charles Darwin and deconstructs Darwinism/neo-Darwinism on the one hand, and on the other continues her demolition of biblical literalism with a critique of the modern quest for the historical Jesus. The God she affirms is the Creator of Nature, the Natural God, whose truth and spiritual Presence, independent of priestly mediation, are democratically available to all.